Late To The Xbox Party: Captain America Super Soldier (2011)

I was a little apprehensive about picking up Captain America: Super Soldier for Xbox 360 a few weeks back. Don’t get me wrong, I love superhero based video games, but I aside from the Wolverine game, I haven’t heard much in the way of positive reviews for superhero games in a while. Actually, when it came to this one, I hadn’t heard anything at all, but a quick look on Metacritic told me that the game got pretty good reviews and that’s pretty much all I was looking for. I wanted to throw a shield at Nazis and punch them until they disappeared.

And that’s pretty much what this game is. You’re Cap from the movie running around World War II kicking ass and taking dossiers. I liked that aspect of the game. The fighting mechanic wasn’t overly complicated — or complicated at all, really now that I think about it — so it was kind of a smash em up which was what I was looking for. There’s even a Super Soldier Sense type vision thing that reminded me of a similar mechanic as the Detective Mode or whatever it was in Arkham Asylum. The problem this time around is that the mechanic made everything yellow-ish, which doesn’t make sense when you realize that the things you’re looking at are in a similar color scheme. You don’t really need it much, so it’s not that big of a deal.

There are other parts, where you hit a particular button at a certain point which launches you through the air to a pole or branch or something you swing from to hit something else. It sounds fun, but it’s actually pretty boring because I never once missed. I feel like I’ve played a game with a similar idea that was executed a lot better, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I wished these were more interesting, I also wished there were fewer parts where you have to jam a certain button over and over. I had trouble with the timing a few times, so I’d screw the finishing kill up, but THEN the enemy would get a certain amount of life back and I’d have to beat on him more. So, basically, you had to do these somewhat complex things just to knock a dumb robot over.

So, no, it wasn’t a perfect game, but I had more fun than frustration with it, so I was happy. My enjoyment level doesn’t always rely on that kind of balance, especially if I’m really looking forward to a game, but I literally went into this hoping to throw shields and punch Nazis. Some of the levels were a little more complicated than they needed to be or the save points were in annoying points, but none of those things were SUPER annoying.